I’m ready for my close-up: Falper

“We’re mostly naked when we’re in the bathroom.”

So reminds us Luca Fallavena, CEO and creative director of respected Italian bathroom brand Falper. “It’s more often than not the first room we enter when we get up in the morning.” There we stand, stripped back, pared down to our corporeal essence. In all our morning glory, you might say.

If you visited the Falper stand at this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, you’ll have seen the manufacturer’s new, pared-down brand presentation, the simplified-yet-ultra-sophisticated result of a year and a half of planning. With its chromatic reduction and its emphasis on real, natural materials, it displays a naked honesty that reflects our naked selves.

The medium is the message
...goes the old Marshall McLuhan slogan, and it could be said that Falper has channelled the Canadian philosopher’s axiom with its redefined brand appearance. For the context in which Falper’s products are presented – not only fair stands, but also dealer showrooms and monobrand stores, as well as its photography, catalogues and online – now speaks the same, rational-but-sensual design language of the products themselves.

A muted palette of black, white and grey combined at the Milan fair with the warmth of acacia wood and the optical texture and nobility of marble to create a stage-set in perfect concert with Falper’s latest designs – highly sculptural washbasins, bathtubs and countertops that drew on the same colours and materials.

Less is more. More or less
Among them, Compasso-d’Oro-recognised architectural grandee and Memphis co-founder Matteo Thun’s supremely rational Monsieur basin, whose delicate articulation in and of space is a veritable study in visual lightness. “This is just the beginning of a larger Monsieur system,” Fallavena explains, “which will be launched next March at ISH Frankfurt.”

Award-winning, Milan-based architect Victor Vasilev (who has recently joined forces with Fallavena as joint creative director at Falper) has authored a trio of basins, meanwhile – Ala, Eccentrico and Wave – which see painstakingly precise geometric forms dovetail with a rich, sensuous materiality.

As a counterpoint, perhaps, creative duo Simone Bonnani and Attila Veress, who both practice and lecture in design, have developed a new collection called Homey. Consisting of bathtub, countertop basin and floor-standing basin, its rounded and friendly forms speak with a somewhat different voice, appealing to those customers who like their bathroom furniture on the fuller side, rather than the filigree. Curves, rather than corners.

Three is the magic number
While Falper’s Salone del Mobile presentation may have focused on its new high-end offering, Fallavena is keen to point out that the company’s refined strategy sees it provide a total design solution for its customers – one that covers more-affordable products as well as those exuding exclusivity. “When you buy a house, you often have more than one bathroom,” he says. “So why should you as an architect or end-consumer look to different brands, if they trust one?”

And so, Falper has organised its product portfolio into three clearly defined segments – White, which comprises entry-level basins and baths; Grey, which consists of its premium products; and Black, for the truly high-end project.

Good things come in threes, it would appear. Also when it comes to the considered and curated way the Falper brand is presented in-store. The company has recently developed new retail guidelines for its dealers internationally, with three different platforms all optimised to provide customers with the best possible brand experience. Falper ID features, as Fallavena puts it, “our products and a touch of our style mixed with the style of the dealer and with their other products”.

Through the line
Falper Studio, meanwhile, sees a specific part of the dealer’s floor-space dedicated to Falper and visible from the street. (One such setting has just opened in Frankfurt, with another due to open in Cortina d’Ampezzo and a further one planned for Amsterdam.) Finally, the Falper Store provides a total, monobrand environment, with one existing store in Berlin and a recently opened address in Paris last month.

It’s all about a greater control by the brand of the complete customer journey, you see. Fallavena explains: “We want to become more visible and more available for our customers all over the world by reinforcing the cooperation between us and our dealers. The way architects and end-consumers keep in touch with a brand is via digital. But then they want to go to a physical dealer and find the brand officially. And it’s often this last link of the chain that’s missing or not clear enough. Which is why we’ve created the Falper Studio and Falper Store. This part is critical.”

Who knew control-freakery could look and feel so right?

© Architonic